The disclosure that President Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sang to a federal grand jury in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution means that the former president’s innermost circle is now a site of legal danger.

Mr. Meadows’s cooperation with Special Counsel Jack Smith, an arrangement first reported by ABC News, appears to involve the bartering of protection from prosecution for testimony that Mr. Meadows knew that the 2020 election was lost, and that he shared that view with Mr. Trump.

To convict the 45th president, the special counsel will have to show that Mr. Trump knew that President Biden bested him and sought to overturn that result anyway. An attorney for Mr. Meadows, George Terwilliger, issued a statement that ABC’s story “was largely inaccurate.” CBS, though, reports that Mr. Trump’s allies are “growing increasingly alarmed that Meadows is testifying in detail and without reservation because he might be seeking an immunity deal or may already have an understanding with prosecutors.”

One way to state the difficulty is to pose this question: Which Mark Meadows is going to testify and in what court? Is it the Mark Meadows with whom Mr. Smith just struck the reported deal in which he will testify that he told Mr. Trump that he had just lost the election? 

Or is it the Mr. Meadows who wrote a book, “The Chief’s Chief,” in which he himself seems to suggest the election was stolen? Or is it a third Mr. Meadows, who is playing the part of a dutiful lieutenant as a criminal defendant in Georgia?

Certainly the role of Mr. Meadows, a lawmaker of North Carolina elevated to run Mr. Trump’s White House, in this legal landscape has been difficult to parse. He does not appear in Mr. Smith’s indictment as either a defendant or as an unindicted co-conspirator — there are six of those. He has, though, been charged by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, for actions related to the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.

Mr. Meadows is attempting to move that case to federal court, arguing that his work in Georgia in the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election was undertaken as part of his federal duties as chief of staff. To try him in state court, he maintains, would violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. That appeal rests with the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

The tussle over venue, it now appears, is happening alongside close cooperation with Mr. Smith. CBS, citing anonymous officials, relates that Mr, Meadows “has provided lengthy and in-depth testimony several times in the past year before the grand jury, as well as providing prosecutors with reams of documents, including text messages, that have provided them with a roadmap of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

Should Mr. Meadows take the stand against Mr. Trump and claim that he told his erstwhile boss that the election was lost, the former president’s attorneys will have a potent counterpoint in their effort to shred the aide-de-camp’s credibility — Mr. Meadows himself. In “The Chief’s Chief,” Mr. Meadow claims the 2020 election was “stolen” and “rigged” with assistance from “allies in the liberal media.”

Now comes American Broadcasting Company, though, to report, again via sources it won’t disclose, that Mr. Meadows told prosecutors that “he’s never seen any evidence of fraud that would undermine the election’s outcome.” The writer Edmund White once mused that “in a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.” Mr. Trump’s team is likely to argue that Mr. Meadows the author and his incarnation as witness cannot both be telling the truth.

For a literary analogue to Mr. Meadows abrupt volte-face one would have to turn to the Bard. In “Othello,” Shakespeare tells the story of how the titular character’s right-hand man, Iago, undid his boss. Iago, as Mr. Meadows is now alleged to have done, said one thing to his commander and another to his foes. “I follow him to serve my turn upon him,” the Elizabethan villain allows.    

Mr. Smith likely figured that if Mr. Meadows was not given immunity he was liable to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination and refuse to answer questions. For his part, Mr. Meadows, already facing the prospect of jail time in Georgia, was likely tempted by an offer of immunity from prosecution at the District of Columbia. Of such calculations are immunity pacts forged.     

Mr. Trump mused on Truth Social, “I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!) by Deranged Prosecutor, Jack Smith.” Mr. Trump, though, allowed that some people are “weaklings and cowards… I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows?”